Students will work in connection with the DFG-funded project “Scalable Reading von „Gesammelten Werken“ des 18. Jahrhunderts, exemplarisch durchgeführt an Friedrich-von-Hagedorn-Werkausgaben”, which is a collaboration of the department for book studies at the University of Mainz and our Digital Philology department. The idea of the project is to explore the book type of “Gesammelte Werke” (collected works) that emerged in the 18th century and had a significant influence on the development of authorial awareness and publishing. “Gesammelte Werke”-editions served in particular to construct a coherent and emphatic image of an author and his or her oeuvre. This can be considered a strategic process, as is evident from the fact that these “Werkausgaben” are usually available in different editions, which differ from one another, whereby these deviations can be read as traces of the effort to construct the image of the author.

To analyse the strategies that have been used in creating these editions, digital methods offer a high potential. In its current stage, the project focusses on the question, how these “Gesamtausgaben” differ from each other, thus revealing different strategies for arranging and modifying the texts to create a certain image of the author. To answer these questions, methods for determining the similarity and the differences of the texts can be used as they are employed in the fields of text reuse, variant analysis and intertextuality. Therefore, possible areas of participation of the students would include the exploration of those methods and the development of according workflows.

Prerequisites for students: Experience with Python is preferable

Project open to: Digital Humanities students

Number of students: 2 to 3